Doctor death

05/09/2026 · by · in neuropsychiatry · Leave a comment

They said the year  left India with a habit of remembering in many mouths at once. One voice is never enough. So the story of Devendra Kumar Sharma is told the same way: not as a single monster’s confession, but as the overlapping testimonies of people who knew the healer before the healer vanished, and the men who hunted what was left.

The Village Voice: Puraini, Aligarh

Old Ramprasad still sits on the same charpai under the neem where Devendra’s father once sat. He speaks slowly, as men do when the name has become a curse.

“Devkinandan Sharma worked in a medicine company in Siwan. He wanted a doctor in the family. A real one. MBBS. The boy studied in Bulandshahr, then went to Bihar. He could not crack the big entrance. So he took the Ayurvedic degree in 1984. BAMS. We were proud enough. ‘At least he will treat the poor,’ we said.

His mother had already gone by then. The father lived long enough to see the clinic open and not long enough to see what came after.

The boy came home less and less. Thirty-three years, some of us counted, and he did not set foot in Puraini again. When the newspapers arrived with that name—Doctor Death—women covered their faces. ‘That cannot be our Devendra,’ they whispered. Then they stopped whispering.”

Ramprasad lights a bidi. The smoke hangs.

“Greed is a quiet guest. It sits first at the table of a man who has already lost something.”

The Patient Voice: Janta Clinic, Bandikui

For nearly eleven years the signboard read Janta Clinic. A woman named Kamla, who brought her son there for jaundice in the early nineties, remembers the doctor’s hands.

“Soft hands,” she says. “He spoke gently. ‘This decoction three times a day. No oil. Come back Thursday.’ He charged little. People from nearby villages came. We thought, here is a man who chose the old medicine because he wanted to stay close to the earth.

One afternoon I heard him on the verandah with another man. Money talk. Gas agency. Dealership. His voice was different—tight, like a string pulled too far.

‘Eleven lakh,’ he said. ‘They took eleven lakh and vanished. I am a doctor. How does a doctor become a fool?’

The other man laughed. ‘Doctor sahib, the world is full of bigger fools. You only have to find them.’”

Kamla never went back after that year. The clinic stayed open a while longer, then the shutters stayed down.

The Fall, Spoken in Two Voices

Devendra, later, in a police room that smelled of sweat and old paper:

“I was cheated. A gas dealership. Everything I had saved from the clinic, from my father’s name, gone. 1994. A man smiles, takes your money, and you are empty. I opened a fake agency the next year to get it back. You think I woke up one morning and decided to become this? No. First you try to stand up. Then you discover standing up requires other people’s legs.”

A truck driver’s widow, years afterward, speaking to a journalist who never printed her full name:

“My husband left with a full tank and a promise to be home by Friday. They told him a long trip, good fare. He never came. The vehicle was sold somewhere in the grey market for twenty or twenty-five thousand. That is what a man’s life was worth on the highway. They said the bodies went into the Hazara Canal at Kasganj. Crocodiles there. The canal keeps secrets better than courts.”

Between 1998 and 2004 the two trades ran together: kidneys and kilometres.

Police accounts and his own interrogation statements said he worked with a doctor named Amit and a chain of middlemen. Poor men from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Nepal were told they would be paid for a kidney. Some were paid a fraction. Some were not paid at all. Investigators said more than 125 illegal transplants passed through the network; each procedure, he claimed, brought him five to seven lakh rupees. Those numbers live in police files and newspaper columns. Courts did not write them one by one onto a conviction sheet.

When a deal soured, or a witness became inconvenient, or a truck carried cylinders he wanted, the road itself became the operating theatre.

He and his associates booked taxis and trucks for long-distance runs. On empty stretches the drivers were killed. Vehicles were altered and sold. Bodies, police said, were put into the Hazara Canal because the water and the crocodiles finished the evidence.

He was charged in connection with at least twenty-one such murders of taxi and truck drivers. In interrogation he was reported to have said he lost count after fifty. Some reports reached for a hundred. What the courts finally held was narrower: life imprisonment in seven murder cases across Delhi, Rajasthan and Haryana, and a death sentence from a Gurgaon court in one case—the killing of a taxi driver named Naresh Verma. The bodies that never surfaced limited what could be proved.

His wife and children left him when the cases became public. That, too, is a kind of verdict.

The Officer’s Voice

A Crime Branch man who worked the later years of the file speaks as if the file is still open on the table.

“We arrested him in 2004. Kidney racket first, then the murders rose behind it like a second disease. He talked. They often talk when they think talking will buy them something. ‘I stopped counting after fifty,’ he said. You write it down. You do not put it in the charge-sheet as gospel. You put what you can prove.

Life in seven cases. Death in one. Tihar. Then the system does what the system does. Parole.

January 2020, twenty days. He did not come back. Seven months we hunted. Found him in Delhi, living another life—widow, property talk, new name. Back inside.

June 2023, two months’ parole. After the third of August he was gone again. This time he chose saffron.

We went to Aligarh, Jaipur, Delhi, Agra, Prayagraj. Six months. Informants, old haunts, a few calls that should not have been made. Finally Dausa. An ashram. He was giving a discourse. Violence, he told the people sitting on the floor, is a great sin.

We waited until the sentence ended. Then we walked in.”

The Ashram Voice

A young man who used to sit in the courtyard at Rameshwar Dham remembers the priest they called Daya Das.

“He had piercing eyes and a calm voice. He spoke of ahimsa. People touched his feet. He said he had come from suffering and found peace. We believed him because we wanted to believe someone could change.

One evening two men in plain clothes sat at the back. After the aarti they asked him to step aside. I saw his face change—only for a second, like a shutter. Then he smiled again.

They took him. Later we heard the name. Doctor Death. The same mouth that had told us not to harm a living being had once decided which living beings would not be found.”

Devendra’s Last Recorded Voice (as the police wrote it)

“I jumped parole because I was not going back. I became a priest because a priest is invisible if he keeps his head down and his words clean. I am sixty-seven. The canal is still there. The clinic is gone. The family is gone. You can lock the body. You cannot lock the years I already spent.”

He did not ask forgiveness in the statements that reached the public. He explained. Explanation is not the same thing.

The Widow Again

She lives in a small house now. The photograph of her husband is faded at the edges.

“They say he was a doctor first. I do not care what he was first. My husband was a driver first, a father first, a man who came home with dust on his shoes and asked whether the children had eaten. That is the only first that matters to me.

They gave him life in seven cases because the rest of the bodies were eaten by water and time. Life is a long word. It is not long enough.”

Closing Voice: The Chronicler

This is not 1857. No sepoy rose in Meerut for Devendra Sharma. Yet the method of the old book still serves: many voices, none of them complete.

A young man from Aligarh took a degree meant to preserve life. He lost money, then invented ways to recover it that required other people’s organs and other people’s last journeys. Courts convicted him of seven murders and one capital case; police and his own words claimed far more. Twice the state opened the door a crack and he walked through it wearing a new face.

In May 2025 they found the priest in Dausa and brought the doctor back to the cells.

The canal at Kasganj still moves. Crocodiles still live in it. Villagers still lower their voices when they say the name of the water.

The voices that remain are the ones that were never thrown in: the patient who remembered gentle hands, the widow who remembers an empty Friday, the officer who remembers a sermon about non-violence, the old man under the neem who remembers a father who only wanted a son to become a doctor.

That is the biography, as far as the living are willing to speak it. The rest belongs to files, to unproven numbers, and to whatever the water refused to give back.

Leave a comment